When Does Your Meditation Practice Bloom?

Although i have tried a wide variety of annuals--for color--over the years, i find i return to some that predictably bloom for me. Begonias in the sandy soil outside the basement door. Impatiens in the semi-shade of the north side of the house.

In my cutting beds, i rely on certain annuals to volunteer year after year--poppies, bachelor buttons, spider flower (Cleome), Nicotiana, love-in-a-mist (Nigella). In recent years i have planted zinnias for their reliability and range of color.

I have sort of given up on the annuals i love, but which just don't perform in my conditions. Cosmos bouquets disappoint me because they are so short-lived. For years, i thought geraniums and portulaca should bloom in a hot, dry spot; but they don't. I now put my geraniums in a pot on the front stoop, and think the Swiss are onto something with their geraniums in window boxes.

When we are learning to meditate, we may try various teachers and various approaches to meditation. Over time, we find that one of these schools of meditation fits us better even though our friends are on to something else. We let go of the approaches that don't quite bloom for us, even though they do for other people.

We feel more at home with particular teachings. We settle into our choice. And our own practice flowers.

Peppers Like It Hot

Returning from a hot vacation in the Southwest, i go out to the vegetable garden and find a dozen red peppers and another dozen somewhere on the green-yellow-red spectrum. In a northern garden, such as mine, i treasure red peppers. With a short growing season, green peppers are a cinch, but orange, yellow, purple or red are chancy because peppers like it hot. And this summer has been hot.

Given the proper conditions, our meditation practice will also ripen in time, and we can harvest the fruits (or vegetables) of a spiritual life.

The question is: How long is our growing season?

Since we don't really know when the frost will fall on our own life, the time to meditate is now.

The Meditative Gardener is hiking in the Grand Canyon and will return after Labor Day

A Master Gardener's Garden

I love going to Master Gardener meetings--once i actually get myself there. The idea of trundling out to someone's garden in the hills feels so out-of-the-way, so i've-got-other-things-to-do.

But i pull into the driveway and park beside 5 other cars. I walk into the 150-year-old little farmhouse that smells like muffins baking. Our host, Steve, is showing us the difference among the 5 tomatoes varieties he's growing this season. Moskowitz--a Russian variety--because it's early. Juliet--halfway between a grape tomato and an Italian tomato--because it's excellent for drying. He shows us his food dryer, which is about the size of a toaster oven.

Then we walk out to his vegetable garden, about 60 x 60. In other words, bigger than his house. New Zealand spinach is difficult to germinate, he says, but it's volunteering in 3 beds other than where it was planted. I taste its tangy, thick leaf.

The 8 people who have shown up ask intelligent questions, make astute observations and share experiences. I am among people who know more than i do about gardening, and i am fascinated.

Sometimes it's hard to drag ourselves to our meditation seat. The world is filled with "more important" things to do. Yet if we simply make the effort to do what we know is good for us, we put ourselves in a position to notice the joy of the inner garden and reap the fruits of mindfulness.

Sweet Onions

This year my onions are all the size of baseballs. No weenie onions. Not one.

Of course, i expect the Walla Walla (Vidalia) onions to be that size, but the golden onions and the red onions are only marginally smaller and are at least the size of tennis balls. Maybe this summer's heat relaxed all of them into rotundness. After all the onion capitals of Walla Walla, Washington and Vidalia, Georgia are hot places. Whatever it was, the conditions were excellent for onions this year.

Sometimes the conditions are just right for the skillful habits we want to grow in our own minds. Years may go by when the fruits of our meditation practice seem rather piddly. Then one sit or one stressful situation, perhaps one where we feel hot under the collar, our new skillful habits save us. That's when we harvest the fruit of the spiritual life.

Did you know that some people eat those sweet Walla Walla onions (the onion-ring onion) like apples?

Harvest vs. Vacation

It happens every August and September: harvest season collides with vacation season.

Cherry tomatoes are dripping off the vine, and i leave home for 2 or 3 days to go to the lake or to the ocean. Green beans point their green fingers accusingly: Are you leaving us on our own--again? And do i dare leave the zucchini alone while i take a 10-day trip to the Grand Canyon?

The impermanence of fresh vegetables leads me straight to dukkha--wanting things to be different than they are. Wanting the vegetables to wait for me, wait until i'm ready for them. So i e-mail my neighbors. "I'm abandoning my garden until Labor Day. Feel free to pick anything you want--tomatoes, chard, beans, squash, cabbage, beets, kale, peppers, cucumbers."

Generosity salves the sting of my garden's surplus.

Raindrop Meditation

Yesterday i sat a day-long retreat with a teacher i've been studying with for 10 years. The gray day soon turned into sprinkling rain--a relief for our parched gardens and a sweet meditation object too. Listening to raindrops brings me straight into the present moment. The mind feels refreshed.

My inner naturalist becomes interested in the habits and habitats of raindrops. Each raindrop i hear is actually the death of the raindrop as it becomes something else--a puddle, a wet streak on a window, damp earth. That raindrop has disappeared. It has passed away. Now it's a rivulet running downhill into a storm sewer into a creek into a river into the ocean.

Our own breath exhales, passes away, passes out of our body and become the air that surrounds us. Air that is breathed by the person sitting next to us or transpired by the tree in the yard or the grass in the lawn.

Water. Air. It's me and mine for a moment. Then it's not. What happens to the me when it becomes the other?